Champagne & Potato-Soup
Champagne & Potato-Soup
TIDES -- Edouard von Keyserling -- Macaulay ($2.50).
To Americans, philosophy-conscious, Keyserling is no new name. Count Hermann von Keyserling's Travel Diary of a Philosopher is considered readable by-many. Hermann's brother Edouard wrote, among other things, Tides, a novel, now translated into English. Will Edouard's novel be as popular as Hermann's philosophy?
The Story. "But that is terrible!" says the first woman, watching the Grill couple stroll, "she was one of our own circle."
"What is so terrible about it?" expostulates her mother. "The shore is wide enough for us to pass by her. . . . You are already jealous of Madame Grill. But, my dear Bella, your husband is after all not a man of that sort. . . . You are the Baroness von Buttlaer and I am the widow of General von Palikow. Well, doesn't that mean that we are two fortresses to which people who don't belong to us have no entree? . . . We simply issue a decree--and Madame Grill ceases to exist,
The antipathy of the two old women is inspired in part by Frau Grill's beauty. The Baroness has others to guard: children and a husband. Lolo, a daughter, swims beyond her strength to be rescued and kissed by lovely Frau Grill. The Baron, informed of this kiss, pays a call of thanks for the rescue, gets snubbed. Hilmar, Lolo's fiance, attaches himself to Frau Grill. It is too much. The two old women make the family leave.
And the Grills? With each other they feel very much alone. For Hans there is always one escape. He is a painter. He has a model he paints by day and loves by night--the sea. The beautiful Frau Grill does very little but remember the days when she was wife of a hoary old ambassador. Then people like the Generalin and the Baroness rendered her kudos. Now she picks quarrels with the young artist who has dragged her out of that old life. Lolo's fiance appeals to her as Hans Grill ennobled. She does not believe with Hans that "no life, even the most ideal, is possible in which for some hours every day there is not a smell of potato-soup." A servant-girl's Utopia, that! Thus the love of wife and husband becomes a subtle struggle, noble v. peasant. When Hans drowns, she takes up with a dwarf of a man whose only attractions are his title, his philosophy, his offer to take her to some island made for dreaming.
The Significance. By the unhappiness of Hans and Frau Grill, Novelist Edouard attempts to show the end of every peasant-noble union. Too good a psychologist, however, to prevent their becoming live individuals instead of idea-puppets, he succeeds in showing only that the couple were incompatible at times when many another husband or wife would have unearthed the remedy. He also shows how new people, people of money and power, took the place of the old nobility in his country. The social lesson is thus outmoded. If the author were to have lectured in the U. S. on the incompatibility of nobles and peasants, few would pay to attend. It is as a psychologist, as the creator of the shrewd Generalin, the love-loving Fraulein Bork, the prurient children, the smug Baron, the fearfully respectable Baroness, highly-principled Hans, class-bound Frau Grill, that Author Keyserling excites greatest admiration.
The Author is eleven years dead. Born in 1855 in Courland, a Russian province on the Baltic Sea. he went to a Gymnasium, to a University, then to Vienna. There he devoured stollen and Socialism. But he lost with his youth his taste for both, and reverted to the aristocratic beliefs of his birth. In 1899, he settled in a Munich flat with his two sisters, remaining there two decades. He had dreamy eyes, not much hair, a drooping mustache.